In current orthodontic practice, the teeth of patients are straightened through the use of orthodontic appliances made up of sets of orthodontic brackets, each of which is secured to one of the individual teeth of the patient. Each of the brackets connects the tooth to an orthodontic archwire which is mounted on the upper or lower arch of the patients teeth by the brackets. Most commonly, the appliance includes one set of upper brackets that specially configured for attachment to the surfaces of the upper teeth and interconnected by an upper archwire, and a set of lower brackets that are specially configured for attachment to the lower teeth and interconnected by a lower archwire.
The archwires that are used in such orthodontic appliances generally have an arcuate shape that corresponds to some archform designed to cooperate with the set of brackets to which they are attached to facilitate the movement of the patient's teeth to some dental archform that the patient's teeth are expected to assume when straightened. Archwires of a large number of preformed shapes are available to the orthodontist. Some archwires are configured for use on the upper teeth of the patient while other archwires are configured for use on the lower teeth of the patient. Each shape has advocates among orthodontic authorities and each has situations or types of treatment for which its use is intended by its designers or preferred by practitioners. The varying anatomies of patients, the variations in bracket designs selected by the practitioner and the particular treatment plan prescribed by the orthodontist affect the selection of archwire shape. Further, the orthodontist's training, experience and treatment theories have a bearing on the archwires that a particular orthodontist will select for treatment of a given case.
In all situations, however, when the application of all of the selection criteria results in the selection of an archwire for either the upper or lower arch of a patient, the wire, when installed by the orthodontist on brackets on the teeth of the patient, cooperates with the brackets to move the teeth toward desired finish positions on the respective dental arch. Because the desired finish positions for the teeth on each of the arches of the patient are positions in which the upper and lower teeth occlude in a predetermined manner, it is incumbent upon the orthodontist to select upper and lower archwires that will cooperate with the respective sets of brackets to move the upper and lower teeth of the particular patient into proper occlusion.
One of the problems encountered in the prior art in the selection of archwires to function in a coordinated manner in a given orthodontic appliance is that the archwires are usually designed produce a preferred dental archform of the teeth in a particular arch, maxillary or mandibular, for which the archwire is designed, or to satisfy some treatment concept for one or the other arch. Most archwire designs, however, have not adequately considered the requirements imposed by the treatment objectives for the teeth of the opposing arch. As a result, archwires that appear to be ideal for treatment of the teeth of a particular arch are found to have no equally effective functional counterpart that is equally ideally suited for the treatment of the other arch, when the two archwires are used together.
Accordingly, there is a compelling need for a method of coordinating the shapes of upper and lower orthodontic archwires. There is a particular need for coordinated sets of orthodontic archwires that can be made available to provide orthodontists with coordinated sets of archwires from which to choose.